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/bˈərbər/ Listen

Berber

noun

A member of an indigenous people of northern Africa.

A cluster of related dialects that were once the major language of northern Africa west of Egypt; now spoken mostly in Morocco.

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Etymology of 'Berber'

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"Berber" Quotes from Famous Books

... another continent. This is still more strikingly exemplified in the case of Portuguese words, which have an almost uncanny way of pretending to be African or Indian. Some readers will, I think, be surprised to hear that assegai occurs in Chaucer, though in a form not easily recognisable. It is a Berber word which passed through Spanish and Portuguese into French and English. We find Fr. archegaie in the 14th century, azagaie in Rabelais, and the modern form zagaie in Cotgrave, who describes it as "a fashion of slender, long, and long-headed pike, used by the Moorish horsemen." ...

— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... they left to the care of vezirs, who were chiefly bent on making their own fortunes, though there were many able, and a few honest men amongst them. The real power rested with the army, and the only check upon the tyranny and debauchery of the army lay in its own jealous divisions. The fanatical Berber regiments imported from Tunis, the bloody blacks recruited in the Sudan, and the mutinous Turkish troops long established in the country, were always at daggers drawn, and their rivalry was the vezirs' opportunity. In such anarchy the country ...

— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

Words linked to "Berber" : Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, African, Tuareg, Afroasiatic, Afroasiatic language, Riffian, riff, Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian language, Almoravid